07 Oct Fallacy Fallacy – FT#182
Show Notes
The Fallacy Fallacy occurs when you assume a claim is false because a logical fallacy was used during arguments supporting the claim.
Trump
We started out by discussing this clip of Trump invoking accusing the media of Contextomy:
Then we looked at this clip of Chuck Grassley during Kash Patel’s confirmation hearing:
And finally we talked about this clip of Eric Burlison defending DOGE:
Mark’s British Politics Corner
Mark talked about these clips of Lord David Frost attacking the concept of NetZero:
Fallacy in the Wild
In the Fallacy in the Wild we looked at this clip from Better Call Saul:
Then we discussed this clip from God’s Not Dead:
And we finished up with this clip from The Good Life:
Fake News
Here are the statements from this week’s Fake News game:
Mark got it right this week, and is still on 51%!
A Government Shutdown is not a logical fallacy
We talked about the current Government shutdown, and who is to blame.
The stories we really didn’t have time to talk about
- Seven years ago, Trump gave a speech at the UN General Assembly, and when he said his administration had achieved more than all past US presidents, the generally assembled leaders of the entire rest of the world laughed at him. Well, they’re not laughing now. Instead, at this year’s speech, they sat dumbstruck by dumbness. The actual real politicians who know what they’re doing and for the most part don’t actively hate the people who voted for them had to sit there while this sundowning fuckwit told them their countries are all going to hell, that the US is living through a golden age, that climate change is the “greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”,, that everyone says he should get the Nobel Peace Prize, that the UN building in New York would have been much better and cheaper if he had won the contract to renovate it back in 2001, that Christianity is the “most persecuted religion on the planet”, and most absurdly, that “I am really good at this stuff”. It doesn’t matter what stuff he was talking about at that moment – he isn’t. Of course, he also railed against the fact that the teleprompters didn’t work and that an escalator stopped while he was on the way to make the speech, which was clearly an act of sabotage. Some people online had fun with the fact that this happened on the day of the supposed rapture and Trump couldn’t even ascend one floor, let alone to heaven. Personally, I’m glad that rapture didn’t happen, because I’ve still got two episodes of The Residence to watch on Netflix. Just kidding, I am NOT getting raptured. Anyway, I’d rather stay down here with all you cool heathens. Where was I? Oh yeah, The escalator thing. Predictably, the right’s already overdeveloped culture of victimhood turned a stopped escalator into an international incident. Propaganda Barbie Karoline Leavitt said that “if someone intentionally stopped the escalator as the President and First Lady were stepping on, they need to be fired and investigated immediately”, presumably in that order. Fox News Host Jesse Watters suggested either leaving or bombing the UN, and his Fox colleague Maria Bartiromo claimed “this could’ve been a massive, massive issue. The president being frozen there in one place makes him vulnerable.” Conservative commentator Wilt Chamberlain agreed, saying “this was remarkably dangerous. If someone in the building wanted Trump assassinated this would have been a great way to freeze him.” They talk like Trump is constantly on the move, ducking and dodging and running in zigzags to avoid snipers. He’s a 79 year old man who stands in one place for hours at a time talking about sharks and Hannibal Lecter. The thing is, as Mitch Hedberg once said, “An escalator can never break: it can only become stairs.” If all that’s needed to endanger the President is some temporarily static stairs, you’ve got bigger problems than sabotage. Of course, in the usual course of right wing victimhood, the sabotage was self-inflicted. Apparently a White House videographer accidentally triggered the emergency stop on the escalator, and the malfunctioning teleprompters were also being operated by Trump’s team. Perhaps they were trying to prevent him from saying some of the stupider shit in his speech. Jokes on them though, because Trump can be stupid extemporaneously.
- I don’t think Trump is modern enough to have watched the movie Elysium where the rich live in a space station orbiting the earth, though I suspect he’d love it – for all the wrong reasons; while it’s a socialist revolutionary movie about rebelling against the whopping class divide between the wealth of the owners of the means of production and the workers providing that wealth, he’d definitely be on the side of the orbiting oligarchs deploying the military police to quell any kind of protest that threatens the exclusivity of the astral Mar-A-Lago. No he’s more a Star Trek Original Series kind of guy, not for the diversity, inclusion and acceptance of working and living alongside all sorts of different species in peace and harmony for the furtherance of boldly going, but rather for the magic beds that Bones has in his medical facility. In an AI-generated video shared on Truth Social the president’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump anchors a fake Fox News segment promoting a new Trump administration healthcare plan she says will result in “MedBed hospitals”. and “national Medbed card[s] for every citizen.” Conspiracy theory believers in the “Medbed” conspiracy have long thought that the U.S. government has technology – the same featured in Elysium – capable of healing wounds, regrowing limbs, curing diseases, and has kept it hidden away from the American public for years, using it only on members of the military and politicians. Needless to say, the beds do not exist, just like they don’t really in Elysium and Star Trek. Yet here’s Trump so convinced by the fake news of it that it got shared on his platform, cos he’s the best president – he’s going to make it available to everyone, and not just the elites. Someone must have reminded him that actually they are not going to renew MediCare insurance subsidies and have been steadily dismantling any semblance of universal free healthcare access cos it’s got Obama’s name on it, in order to fund a tax cut for the top 1% so how, or even why, will they roll out MedBeds to everyone. But he definitely only took the post down on the basis of “now everyone will want one you fool, and then I’ll have nothing that they don’t have, you can’t be King like that! That’s practically communism!” Also it’d use up all the available money, tech and 1.21 gigawatts of power the US generates in order to make one big and powerful enough to house his huge dysfunctional, unhealthy blob of a carcass. Ah, can’t wait til he reposts footage of those zero-gravity humans in Wall-E!
- At the end of September, former weekend Fox and Friends host Pete Hegseth ordered every senior US general and admiral worldwide to drop whatever they were doing, leave whatever active warzone command post they were running, and join him at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia for an in person meeting. This is not only hugely disruptive and expensive, but also pretty much unprecedented, so he must have had some urgent and vital news or strategy to announce that could only effectively be done in person. Sure enough, when the 800 or so senior military leaders gathered, Hegseth redefined the parameters of a meeting that could have been an email by demanding an end to fat soldiers and beards. The Secretary of War who can’t do a single pull up lectured the career soldiers on the warrior ethos, briefly hawked his own book, and then told them about just some of the ways he plans to actively make the military worse – saying “no more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement”, referring to the directives that were created after WWII to prevent war crimes. He said no more to “identity months”, “climate change worship”, “dudes in dresses”, and demanded a return to hazing, and drill sergeants being allowed to “put their hands on recruits”. He also feels that military careers are side-tracked by accusations of unacceptable behavior, which is something he knows a little about, as someone who paid $50,000 to a woman who accused him of sexual assault in 2017. Eager to avoid that kind of thing happening to soldiers, Hegseth called for “No more frivolous complaints, no more anonymous complaints, no more repeat complaints, no more smearing reputations,” so presumably, so long as you behave inappropriately on a regular basis, it will be dismissed as a repeat complaint and you’ll be cleared. Fortunately for the generals, they hadn’t totally wasted their time in coming to hear him speak, because after Secretary Pete was done, Trump came on, and immediately complained about the lack of applause from military officers who are not allowed to express partisan views while on duty. He told them if they didn’t like what he said they could leave, and threatened their jobs if they did, and did a tight five on the Gulf of America and Joe Biden’s autopen, and then announced his plan to use American cities as training grounds for the US military, which he said “is going to be a major part for some of the people in this room. That’s a war, too. It’s a war from within.” Totally cool and normal thing for a President to say.
- Democrats are accusing House Speaker Mike Johnson of stalling the swearing-in of newly elected Adelita Grijalva, who will represent Arizona’s 7th Congressional District, because she will sign a petition forcing a vote on releasing the Jeffrey Epstein files. Grijalva said in a September 30 statement sent to Newsweek, “Earlier this year, two Republicans in Florida were sworn in during pro forma sessions less than 24 hours after their elections. The fact that Southern Arizona is being treated differently raises serious questions about political motivations – especially since I have pledged to become the 218th signature on the discharge petition to force a vote on the Epstein files.” The petition is missing one signature hers would force a vote on the matter.
Call me naive but I just don’t understand what the problem is cos surely we’ve been told the files don’t exist/do exist and/or its a Democrat hoax and/or Trump is/isn’t on there and would/would not thus be liable to something or nothing. Oh actually that’s the problem, it’s not nuanced – it’s just wrong! The sound of the old V8-powered goalposts being driven up and down the White House dragstrip, not heard since the previously turns-out-to-be-true Russian conversation that did/didn’t happen from out of Trump Tower, no it didn’t, we don’t know anything about that, the tapes with the voices saying that on them are obviously a Democrat hoax, oh sorry you mean those beautiful conversations I bragged about? Well no I didn’t. Just when you thought Trump was actually stupid and thus harmless (no-one thinks that) turns out the GOP knows that and knows exactly what it’s doing and having Stupid as their malicious narcissistic front man provides all the smoke screen they need. We all see it, we know it, they know it and yet…and yet! - We’ve talked about the One Big Beautiful Bill a few times, and there are so many things wrong with it that I honestly can’t remember if we mentioned that the Congressional Budget Office estimated it would result in 3 million more Americans being unable to qualify for SNAP benefits. That’s the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, formerly and colloquially still known as food stamps, a federal government program that provides food-purchasing assistance for low- and no-income persons to help them maintain adequate nutrition and health. But fuck those poor people, says the GOP they should have had the good sense not to be poor, like we did. The benefit of the Bigness of the beautiful bill was that it was hard to talk about all the badness in it, and while a good chunk of Republican voters are actively happy that poor people don’t get to buy bread with taxpayer money, it’s not one of those policies that everyone agrees with. Unfortunately for the Trump Administration, for the past thirty years the US Department of Agriculture has released an annual report on Household Food Security in the US, which is seen as the gold standard for understanding the struggle that millions of families face to put food on the table. Fortunately for the Trump Administration, rules aren’t a thing anymore, so this year’s report, which covers 2024, will be the last. After all, we know Trump’s theory on COVID testing, and so obviously if you stop counting the number of hungry people, they stop existing. Actually, there’s a point at which that one kind of comes true. Fuck.
- Yaaay what’s the next best thing to Jacob Wohl resurfacing? It’s the QAnon Shaman! In a rambling complaint, Jacob Chansley the poster boy of insurrection and buffalo-hat face-paint fashionista is representing himself, naturally, for a suit he filed on Monday in Maricopa County Superior Court. A rambling, 26-page complaint consisting of a single paragraph alleging that his First, Fourth and Second Amendment rights have been violated by a host of parties – Trump, the Federal Reserve, the National Security Agency, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Bank of International Settlements, the state of Israel, Elon Musk’s X Corp., T-Mobile, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and Warner Bros. Studios. The claims in Chansley’s suit include:
- That the central banking system and the Federal Reserve are unconstitutional
- That the U.S. government is guilty of treason for prioritizing the interests of foreign financiers at the expense of the American people
- That the NSA surveilled Chansley daily using the Patriot Act as he was writing a “2nd Declaration of Independence”
- That “all radio stations and most of their DJ’s are a part of the intelligence community”
- That a scene in the 2008 Christopher Nolan-directed Batman film “The Dark Knight” and many plot details in 2009’s “Avatar” were cribbed from his writing and are proof that the NSA was spying on him
- That the NSA catfished him on Facebook by contacting him while pretending to be actress Michele Rodriguez, whom Chansley identifies as “my celebrity crush”
- That he was then “offered the opportunity to work with the NASA covertly and help them deal with other-worldly matters” that his “shamanic beliefs” made him “a perfect candidate to handle”
- That he was emailed by Donald Trump on Jan. 8, 2021, from an address of donaldtrump@nsa.gov
- That the government stole more than $100,000 in cryptocurrency from him
- Chansley concludes his complaint by declaring himself the first president of the “New Constitutional Republic of the United States.” and that Phoenix will be the capital of this new republic. As his first act, Chansley said he would order the Federal Reserve to mint a one-ounce gold coin and set its value at $40 trillion to pay off America’s debt – which isn’t really how debt or currency works. “I am within all of my own rights and legal authority to do this because all of the information provided in this lawsuit is factual and cannot be argued, if a person were in the loop of what I had written on my computer a few months prior those details would stand out to a sharp mind.” Perhaps if that sharp mind (sic) belonged to Dinesh D’Souza? And in a Dinesh D’Souza-esque “there’s more evidence that we’re not able to bring you right now” kind of way Chansley did include a handwritten URL for a Google Drive folder that he said contains more than 1,000 exhibits that prove his accusations. Phoenix New Times encountered an error attempting to access it.
- In all the best democracies, the one thing we are guaranteed to see is political opponents being performatively prosecuted at the whim of an authoritarian leader. Sorry, not democracies, banana republics. That’s what I meant. We know this is an uncontroversially good thing because of how happy Republicans were when there was a slight chance that Trump might face a single tiny consequence for all the crimes he absolutely committed. So of course, everyone’s equally happy about the indictment of former FBI director James Comey. To be fair, if you’re going to indict someone and are hoping to please everyone, Comey’s a great shout, as pretty much everyone dislikes him for different reasons – Democrats because of his thumb on the scales that helped Trump’s election, and Republicans because he planned to actually investigate the links between the Trump Campaign and Russian interference in the election. But we’ve got this weird thing on the left where we only think people should be indicted for crimes they actually committed, even if we don’t like that person. Trump disagrees, of course, and that’s why he fired US Attorney Erik Seibert, who foolishly refused to indict Comey on the flimsy basis that he hadn’t committed a crime, and replaced him with Lindsey Halligan, an insurance lawyer with no previous prosecutorial experience. She’s already fucked up in court, presenting the judge with a signed indictment on three counts, only two of which had actually been accepted by the grand jury. Meanwhile, because the entire administration is a shitshow, an FBI agent has been fired for refusing to arrange a perp walk for Comey where he’s arrested and handcuffed in front of news cameras. Perp walks, by the way, are prohibited by DOJ policy, but Trump really wanted one, and that’s what really matters.
- Well in Britain it’s all going down the Tubes except when the Tube is on strike of course. The Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood is being more Suella or Priti than her previously-seen-protesting-pre-election-about-Palestine-in-July 2024-self. Shabana is bringing in more powers to prevent repeat protests against Israel’s actions in Palestine, despite the fact that the British Government has been the first in Europe to recognise the Palestinian State. Even taking that into account it’s still illegal to protest against the Palestinian genocide in perceived suppport of the proscribed terrorist organisation Palestinian Action, this has led to the recent arrest and leading away of a blind woman who obviously couldn’t even see that she was holding a placard demanding the end to the genocide. The new powers would prevent people gathering in the same place time and time again cos that causes problems for policing and indeed drains the resources of the police force. In danger of employing the false equivalence fallacy surely the same could have been said of the protesters gathering outside the same so-called immigrant hotels week after week, but no extra powers employed there. This comes in the wake of several people being killed in an attack on a synagogue after which the Palestinian support protests were deemed to be in poor taste and should be called off. Zak Polanski the leader of the Green Party, and Jewish himself, pointed out that that was a conflation of two separate things, and reacting to the deaths of three or so people and 10s of thousands of people could both happen at the same time, and saying otherwise would be falling into the Israeli government’s claiming that anti-Zionism and anti-Netanyahu-ism was the equivalent of anti-semitism. Zak thankfully said the thing we often say “ it’s a bit more nuanced than that”. Meanwhile knives are out, obviously, for Corbyn and his new party, I’ve seen the ‘unelectable” word being bandied about again, ignoring the stats that show that Corbyn’s election results in 2017 at 40% of the public vote outweighed Starmer’s 34% in 2024. But with Zak Polanski I guess being the equivalent of Gavin Newsom in terms of speaking against the right-leaning tide, both Starmer and Corbyn need to look out, if only the media would show more of Zak than tweedy gonad Farage, perhaps he wouldn’t be being drumrolled into Number 10 and Reform-fearing Shabana wouldn’t be being such an arse.
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